Mugabe Extends 33-Year Zimbabwe Rule as Rival Seeks Support

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, center, speaks at a press briefing on July 30, 2013 at the State House in Harare, on the eve of Zimbabwe's presidential and parliamentary vote. Photographer: Jekesai Njikizana/AFP via Getty Images

Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was
re-elected and won the two-thirds legislative majority his party
needs to change the constitution as his main rival urged African
leaders to overturn what he said was a fraudulent vote.

Mugabe, 89, got more than 61 percent in the July 31 ballot
to extend his 33-year rule, according to results from the
Zimbabwe Electoral Commission yesterday. Prime Minister Morgan
Tsvangirai, who won 34 percent, said he wants an investigation
of the vote, mainly of the voters roll and ballot papers, and
will submit a dossier of alleged fraud to the African Union and
the Southern African Development Community. The U.S. called the
election “deeply flawed.”

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front
last had a parliamentary majority after elections in 2005 and
has shared power with Tsvangirai since 2009, following a
disputed poll marked by violence. The main local monitoring
team, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, said balloting in
last month’s vote was “seriously compromised.” The AU and
SADC, which sent the biggest international observer teams,
endorsed the election as largely free and fair.

“In light of substantial electoral irregularities reported
by domestic and regional observers, the United States does not
believe that the results announced today represent a credible
expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people,” Secretary of
State John Kerry said in a statement yesterday.

Alleged Violations

The U.K. has “grave concerns over the conduct of the
election,” Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement
published on the government’s website. “It is important that
all allegations of electoral violations are thoroughly
investigated.”

The Movement for Democratic Change will use the courts to
force a fresh election and won’t participate in any government
or state institutions until that happens, Tsvangirai told
reporters yesterday in the capital, Harare.

“We didn’t lose this election,” he said. “Instead of
celebrating, there is national mourning.”

Zanu-PF won 160 parliamentary seats, compared with 49 for
the MDC and one for an independent candidate, according to the
commission. A further 60 are reserved for women and allocated by
proportional representation. While votes for Tsvangirai slipped
from 2008 to 1.17 million, Mugabe almost doubled his total to
2.11 million. A similar pattern was repeated in several
constituencies that Zanu-PF won back from the MDC.

Electoral Mandate

Zanu-PF received a mandate to govern and will proceed
without the MDC if they boycott the government, Defense Minister
Emerson Mnangagwa told reporters.

The international community must “respect the people of
Zimbabwe,” Mnangagwa said. “We are now going to implement our
indigenization and empowerment policy as a guideline to guide
and govern for the next five years.”

Mugabe and Zanu-PF have forced mining companies such as
Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd. and Anglo American Platinum Ltd.
to cede majority stakes in their local assets to black
Zimbabweans or the government. The southern African nation has
the world’s second-biggest platinum and chrome reserves, as well
as diamond, gold and coal deposits. Tsvangirai has promised to
repeal the measure.

Commission member Mkhululi Nyathi quit over the manner in
which the elections were conducted, the Harare-based Newsday
newspaper reported yesterday, citing his resignation letter.
Commission spokesman Shupikai Mashereni declined to comment.

Security Forces

Tsvangirai, 61, said thousands of people were turned away
from polling stations because they weren’t on the electoral
roll, voters were bused to cast ballots outside their home areas
and the security forces controlled the election process.

“It’s a classic case of electoral authoritarianism, where
elections are used but only to legitimize the regime,” Judy
Smith-Hohn, foreign-policy analyst at the South African
Institute of International Affairs, said by phone Aug. 2 from
Pretoria.

The MDC appeared unlikely to receive support from regional
powers that brokered a national unity government between Mugabe
and Tsvangirai after violence marred a disputed 2008 vote.

President Jacob Zuma of neighboring South Africa called on
all parties to accept the outcome after observers described the
vote as “an expression of the will of the people,” according
to an e-mailed statement.

‘Fairly Credible’

The head of the AU observer mission, former Nigerian
President Olusegun Obasanjo, said incidents during the election
didn’t invalidate the result. “The election is free” and
“fairly credible,” he told reporters.

Speaking for the SADC, Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard
Membe said that while the vote was “free and peaceful,” the
regional body had yet to determine if it was fair. “We are
endorsing the elections,” he said in a separate interview.

Richard Nyeya, 40, a mobile phone-airtime salesman in
Harare’s Avondale suburb, disagreed with the assessment. “It’s
as obvious as water is wet that the election was rigged,” he
said, adding that the whole city is “depressed.”

“The focus was on whether the vote was peaceful, not
whether it was a proper election,” said the South African
institute’s Smith-Hohn. “The credibility of SADC and the AU as
neutral observers is seriously called into question” if they
back the outcome without an investigation of the grievances of
the MDC and others, she said.

Urban Voters

The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, which had almost 10
times as many observers as the AU and SADC, said as many as 1
million voters in the MDC’s urban strongholds were left off the
electoral roll.

“Before election day, the voter-registration process was
systematically biased against urban voters,” the Zimbabwean
monitoring group said in an e-mailed statement on Aug. 1. “A
total of 99.97 percent of rural voters were registered, versus
only 67.94 percent of urban voters.”

The “credibility, legitimacy, free and fair conduct” of
the elections and “their reliability as the true expression of
the will of the people of Zimbabwe have been highly
compromised,” a body of non-governmental groups from across the
SADC, which deployed 150 observers to mainly rural areas, said
in an Aug. 2 statement.

The MDC “has to look at its shortcomings,” Gwinyayi
Dzinesa, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute
for Security Studies, said Aug. 2 in a phone interview from
Harare. “Regardless of the election irregularities, Zanu-PF did
its homework.”

The rejection of the vote by Tsvangirai followed a campaign
largely free of the violence in the last Mugabe-Tsvangirai
contest in 2008.

Tsvangirai led the first round of the election that year
before he pulled out of a runoff, saying about 200 of his
supporters had been killed. The MDC beat Zanu-PF in the
parliamentary ballot. The 15-nation SADC negotiated a power-sharing agreement in 2009, leaving Mugabe as president and
Tsvangirai as prime minister.